Yusra Fakier

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

If these walls could talk

My practice explores memory, identity, and material culture within the home. Mid-year I got married and moved out of my home in Bo-kaap that had shaped me for 21 years and formed the basis of much of my previous practice. The work takes the form of a photobook, If these Walls Could Talk, which documents both my childhood home in Bo-Kaap and the new home I entered in Lansdowne. The photobook serves as a record of a multigenerational household, where structures, objects and furniture bear witness to histories far older and deeper than my own. Couches, tea sets, and cupboards become storytellers, having seen life and death, happiness and sadness as well as resistance. 

My photobook moves between personal narrative and collective history. In doing so, it expands Dubow’s insight into the probing nature of photography and locates my practice within a conversation about how private memory and material culture can expose the lingering architectures of apartheid while simultaneously sustaining forms of resilience and continuity (Dubow, 1998). My 4th year work is envisioned as a gatefold book in which 2 books read against each other. My book contains photographs of my Pepper Street home in Bo-Kaap, the objects, people and everyday moments as well as images from family albums, archival images and maps. It also contains images of my new home, the furniture, the second dwelling that was adapted for myself and my husband. Embedded in the book’s layout are similarities and contrasts. 

My photographs document a material culture within my childhood home, yet they also speak of a collective memory. They shed light on moments that appear banal and quiet but are filled with life; a couch that’s been worn down because of years of being laughed on laid on and slept on, a washing lines that’s edges are fraying after being reused so many times, or a clock that appears in archival photographs as well as present ones. These are moments that reiterate the idea that these structures of things have witnessed and lived through more than I have. They in turn become vessels of these memories. The transition between my two homes can be felt in the work itself: photographs of Bo-Kaap seem to radiate warmth and familiarity, while those in Lansdowne feel colder, capturing this change in intimacy’s that I’ve grappled with. Alongside the photobook, I created doepmal trays made from the wood of a tree cut down outside my Bo-Kaap home. This is significant because this tree has stood outside my home for my whole life and many decades before it. In using this wood, felt like an honouring to the tree and an accumulation of the memories I’ve had in front of it. 

Doepmal trays are trays that are used during the name giving ceremony in Islamic Malay culture These trays became holders of memory. They become reminiscent of the biscuit tins that hold the sewing materials and the draws and cupboards and the garage or the top shelf in my nanas room that hold these material things that are filled with memory and have been touched by lives that I have not encountered. They also function as sculptural ‘books’ in themselves, extending the photographic narrative into three-dimensional form. Additionally, they signify the stories they hold of birth, naming and new life, which became particularly important to me as I went through this change.